Biog new

BIOGRAPHY

There’s a thrilling tension in making a photograph, between controlling and reporting, between crafting a vision and conspiring with reality to expose its essence.

Whether Jamie Baker is constructing an elaborate portraiture tableau from intensive research, capturing breathlessly intimate backstage reportage at a couture show, collaborating with a multi-media artist on a dynamic performance piece or creating iconic, genre-challenging campaign imagery, it’s this creative tension, and its power to reveal unknown stories, that make him photography’s zealous co-conspirator.

First making his mark with exuberant, sexy reportage images at once stylised and raw of the unfolding dance music revolution of the 1990s, London-based Baker honed a hungry narrative instinct, while moodily beautiful splashes of a documentary aesthetic hinted at the enquiring eye that has pushed his work into ever more challenging territory. The desire to master lighting sparked a move into commercial and editorial fashion work, where Baker’s fresh, powerful compositions and artistic lighting strategies soon became hallmarks that won him prestigious commissions from publications both hipster and world-leading, and propelled his imagery onto advertising campaigns and album and book covers.

With his first solo exhibition, 2007’s Marathon Man at London’s Association of Photographers Gallery, reportage and landscape images captured on an emotional odyssey to Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil signalled Baker’s growing urge to explore the more oblique avenues offered by personal projects, his broader cultural interests and the areas both established and emerging where photography and art meet.

Baker’s recent commercial and editorial work has seen him distil the best of all the skills and instincts he has explored over his 17-year career, while pursuing his fascination with photography’s broader narrative possibilities with a new urgency. He has worked as creative director and short film director on fashion campaigns. He has art directed a team of photographers on a project documenting cutting-edge digital artworks and their interplay with their viewers at Microsoft and Vice’s global The Creators Project in Beijing with innovative reportage and stop-motion movies. And his portraiture practice has broken new ground, incorporating rich research and meticulously realised conceptual approaches that express a more searching artistic vision. Increasingly stimulated by fine art, Baker is currently preparing a touring documentary exhibition, and his collaborations with artist Echo Morgan on photographic interventions within her performance work recently yielded the acclaimed multimedia exhibition Warrior at Blackall Studios in Shoreditch, London.

Graduated with first-class honours in Photography and Electronic Imaging from the University of Westminster in 1994

Won The Guardian’s Student Photographer of the Year prize in 1995

Became one of Muzik’s principal photographers in 1997

Shot Nissan advertising campaigns in London and Tokyo respectively, in 2003 and 2004

As creative director shot campaigns for Religion, Firetrap and Idol between 2004 and 2009

Baker’s backstage reportage of Mary Katrantzou’s fashion show featured in Vogue (US) in 2011